Week 4: Supersize That!

More is always better, right?

About 10,000 years ago, humans took a step that changed our dietary future forever:   We made the transition from hunter-gather subsistence toward horticulture and then agriculture.

It is interesting to imagine the process involved in taking that step.  What led our ancestors to begin the process of intentionally planting seeds in the ground for the purpose of harvesting, instead of just collecting as they grew naturally?  What inspired them to take wild animals, collect them in some fashion to control their wanderings to use them for sustenance?  Was the first animal used for meat or for milk or even for their pelts, or perhaps for protection?  It is useful to consider possible scenarios that might have led to the rise of pastoralism, horticultural and agriculture as it tells us a lot of the mentality and adaptive forces of those ancestors.  Consider this question:  What were our ancestors thinking when they chose to change how they obtained the food resources their families needed to survive?

Regardless of how it happened, that single step opened up doorways to humans that otherwise probably never would have been available to them.  Consider the benefits of adopting agriculture to our human ancestors:

Fields of grain

Surplus:  Agriculture (and horticulture/pastoralism) produces more food than a hunter-gatherer approach.  This allows for storage of food to guard against times when food is scarce.

Blacksmith

Specialization:  With a larger quantity of food produced by a smaller group of people, this opens up the opportunity for others to do something besides food production, activities such as tool production, making pottery, creating clothing, processing harvested grain, baking, butchering… the list goes on and on.

Trade Market

Trade:  With some people producing excess food and other producing goods, agriculture opens up the possibility of trade, which eventually resulted in a monetary economic system.

Banaue Village

Sedentary residence patterns:   When your food doesn’t move, then you don’t have to either.  People can settle in one location and build more permanent structures.  Combined with specialization and trade, this led to the establishment of villages, then towns, and finally city centers.

Greek Acropolis

The Benefits of City-States:  Centralized governments, education, organized religion, art, science, trade with other city-states, the flow of new techniques, new tools and new ideas.

All of this is tied directly with the advent of food-production techniques.  The reason you are taking this course, using a computer, listening to music, watching a movie, voting, driving a car, and thinking about a new phone upgrade is because of agriculture.  No kidding.

So agricultural is wonderful.  It must be the best option for humanity when it comes to subsistence patterns.  It must provide the most reliable and healthiest option for our dietary needs, right?

Right?

There is an article available for you to read in the Canvas Course Resources module (The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond) which challenges this very question.  I encourage you to take the time to read it as it takes the common assumption that agriculture is “best” compared with other subsistence patterns and asks the question, “Best for what?”

Comparative studies have been conducted comparing the health of traditional hunter-gatherer populations with that of agricultural populations.  They have compared such measures as nutritional deficiencies, dental disease, and incidences of famine.  In every category, agriculture was on the losing side of the study.  Agricultural populations are more likely to have vitamin and nutritional deficiencies.  Why?  Because their diet is much less diverse than that of hunter-gatherer populations, providing fewer food options and therefore increasing the likelihood that the diet will be missing needed nutritional building blocks.  Agricultural populations tend to have greater incidences of dental disease, following not just a higher concentration of high sugar fruits and other food stuffs, but more processed grains and starches that can also make dental health harder to maintain.  Perhaps the greatest surprise was the higher incidence of famine.  Isn’t that what agricultural surplus supposed to prevent?  But agricultural populations can become highly dependent upon a limited number of crops.  If those fail, their fallback options are few and they have lost many of their traditional gathering skills and sources that would allow them to temporarily adapt until the crops recover.  Hunter-gatherer are susceptible to dry periods, but they are much more adaptable and highly mobile, allowing them to adjust their diet to whatever is available and also traveling to wherever the food happens to be.

This raises an interesting question:   Do our cultural (and physical) adaptations exist because they benefit a population in general, regardless of how long ago the adaptations arose?  Or do these adaptations exist because they benefit a population right at the very moment the practices arose?  Another way of asking this problem is this:  Do the adaptive processes that produce our traits and behaviors, both biological and cultural evolution, produce traits that think long term into the future, resulting in traits that will provide long-term benefits, or do they only produce immediate benefits?

If any of you are familiar with Richard Dawkin’s book, The Blind Watchmaker, you might be familiar with the idea of evolution (again, both physical and cultural) as a blind, tinkering watchmaker.  The watchmaker (representing evolutionary processes) can’t look into the future to figure out what would be best for an organism millions of years from now, but he does work with the materials he has to produce traits that work right now in the immediate present.  These adaptive processes can’t plan ahead.  They can’t plan at all.  They aren’t alive.  They aren’t conscious.  They don’t make intentional “decisions”.  The adaptations these processes produce exist not because there has been an intentional calculation made to make sure they are the “best”.  They are simply those that leave behind the most individuals that possess or practice and pass on those traits.

No comment

The result is a behavioral practice just like agriculture.  By practicing agriculture, you can produce and support a larger population who will survive and continue to practice agriculture.  That doesn’t rule out complications or downsides sometime in the future.  That doesn’t mean those populations will all be healthier, have fewer cavities and never starve.   All that matters is how many people practices and pass on this pattern of subsistence.  It’s literally the domination of overwhelming quantity over ideal quality.

This is probably a very new idea for many of you, the concept that the traits we practice now don’t have to be the best for us, they just happen to be very good at being practiced by a larger number of people some time in our human evolutionary history.  Think about how few people cut back on fats and sugars.  That would make us healthier and be a better behavior for us to practice, right?  So why do most of us crave fats and sugars and all of those things that are so bad for us?  Because in our evolutionary history, those who ate well when food was readily available would be more likely to survive when there wasn’t enough, as there was sure to be.  It’s feast or famine.  Did our dietary preferences evolve to plan for the days when food would always be readily available for anyone who could walk into your corner McDonald’s and order 2000 calories of food for a few dollars?  No, it did not occur with any foresight to the future at all.  Unfortunately, we are stuck in modern times with modern food supplies coupled with our prehistoric appetites.

So here is the question for you to consider:  I’ve highlighted a very few specific downsides to agriculture, but there are many more to consider.

• What are some modern problems that have arisen that can be traced to our adoption of agriculture 10,000 years ago?  Post a comment for this discussion that outlines a downside of agriculture, identifying how this downside was originally produced as the result of some type of benefit to human populations  and how it has become not so beneficial now.   These downsides could relate to our biology, our diet, our social patterns, our economic patterns, and our natural environment.  I am sure there are more categories than this, so don’t limit yourself.  You just need to try to understand why the adaptation existed in the first place and what happened to produce the downside.  This first comment is worth 5 bonus points.

• If you want to earn an additional 5 points, post a response to another student’s comment.  This can be supportive or you can challenge their line of thinking with an alternative view. 

See what you can do with this exploration human behaviors and practices.   What do you think?

Week 3: Born This Way?

NOTE:  This post is about "gender roles", not about gender itself.  We are taking on a cultural discussion about how those roles are shaped. 

Love her or just can’t stand her, there is no denying the role Lady Gaga plays (here as her male alter ego, Jo Calderone) in shocking our society into taking a closer look at our preconceptions regarding how we view the male vs. female dichotomy in our society.  We may feel like we have come a long way (baby!) since the days of the stay-at-home mom raising the kids and keeping the home while the dad heads to work every day to put in his 9-to-5 hours before returning home for dinner and an evening with the family.  We are modern!  Women have broken into roles traditionally held by men (Kamala Harris as Vice President and women graduating from West Point are good examples) and men have bravely learned to change diapers and attend PTA meetings.  But when faced with someone like Lady Gaga who not only gender-bends with ease but frequently and deliberately behaves in ways traditionally felt to be "inappropriate" for her own sex, that twinge of discomfort some may feel should help us recognize that our beliefs and preconceptions of gender roles are deeply ingrained and not so easily altered.

Lady Gaga, in her own unique way, is actually highlighting a question that has been the focus of exploration for generations of anthropologists, namely that of the source of our gender roles within our cultures.  At the center of this debate is the question of the forces that have the greater influence over the shaping of those roles, whether it be our genetics or our environment.  It is the age-old “nature vs. nurture” question.

First the nature side:  It is a common misconception in students new to anthropology that when we speak of the two primary sexes within the human race, we are also speaking of gender... that the two are interchangeable.  They are not.  Sex is strongly influenced by genetics.  We see that clearly in the match-up between the genetic genotypes for sex and the resulting phenotypic (or outward) expression of those genotypes; the sex chromosomes XY produces the outward phenotype of a male body and the paired XX chromosomes result in a female body.   Accompanying those body shapes are the biological roles of sperm production and child-bearing, which further influence behaviors. (NOTE:  There are many other factors, genetic and otherwise, involved that make this more complex and water down the dichotomous nature of these two sexes to produce more than just the two, but we won't delve into this here.)  If sex truly equaled gender, we would expect that gender roles would vary little across cultures, driven by our genes.

But gender varies greatly across culture.  Admittedly, when viewing gender roles, there are many similarities related to those biological roles, but otherwise there is greater flexibility in the resulting gender roles across culture compared with sexual roles.  In some cultures, women are considered to be completely subservient to men while in other matriarchal cultures, women have significant power and influence among their people.  So clearly, something else is going on here more than simple genetics.   

But what do we mean by "environment" when talking about the "nurture" forces influencing our gender behaviors?  Just like the physical and cultural traits you discussed in your assignment in Week 2, gender roles can be heavily influenced by the physical environment, the availability of food resources, and the climate.  Where resources are hard to come by and work effort is crucial for survival, the labor of women will be valued in addition to their ability to bear children.  Where resources are more plentiful and the work effort of women is not as important as their ability to bear offspring, the role of women will be much different.  But women’s roles (and the roles of men in return) can also be influenced by social, economic, religious and even political pressures, as we are seeing in our own political culture when the “appropriate” role of women and men often becomes one of the central discussions between political candidates.  

So which is more important, nature or nurture?

There have been times in our anthropological history when there were purists arguing that our gender roles were purely the result of our genes (nature) or of our environment (nurture).  Those who argued for genes alone were called “genetic determinists” while those who argued for full environmental control considered themselves to be “Free Will” proponents, which may seem odd when we have little more control over our developmental environment than we do of our genes.  But for the most part, all modern anthropologists agree that both play important roles in shaping how men and women take part in their particular cultures.   

by Pranav Purshotam, UNICEF India, 2010 

There is also common recognition that even within any particular behavioral pattern, both genes and the environment will share responsibility for the final expression of that behavioral trait.  An example of this is the practice of breast-feeding.  Obviously, genetics plays a key role in the ability of a mother to breastfeed her child.  But different environments influence the final decision to fulfill this role.  In hunter-gatherer societies, where there are no food surpluses and certainly no corner grocery store selling formula, the mother's role of sole-food provider to her baby will be met to insure the baby's survival.  But in a society such as ours when alternatives to breast-feeding exist and where women are valued equally (or more) as a provider of a paycheck as for her ability to breastfeed, there is less need for a mother to engage in this behavior and therefore there will be greater variability in its practice.  So both nature and nurture play a role in shaping our gender behaviors.

Of course, that doesn’t end the battle!  The nature vs. nurture debate is alive and well as anthropologists argue over which factor has the greater influence, our genes that shape us or the environment we are born into that re-shapes us?  Does one take precedence over the other?  Does one have greater power to shape how we look and how we behave and what role we play in our culture?  The question isn’t simply academic.   It is important to know, particularly when behavior roles seem to go wrong (as in the case of infanticide or pedicide or child abuse), which factors may have the greatest influence in not only shaping our behaviors in a positive way but also in a negative fashion.  How else to prevent a negative behavior than to understand how it comes about?

Why blue and pink?

So here is the question for this week:  Which factor do you think takes precedence in the shaping of the gender roles in any culture?  Do you think our genes and our environment are equally important or is one more crucial than the other?  Or do you fall into one of the still remaining extremes that feel that one or the other is entirely responsible for gender roles?   See if you can think of a human gender behavioral pattern that supports your position and lay out the forces (genetic and/or environmental) that shape it.  Your complete answer to this question will be worth 5 bonus points.

For an additional 5 bonus points, respond to one of your fellow students.  You can support what they have written with further evidence or you can challenge their argument with one of your own.  Don't be afraid to disagree, just do so respectfully and make sure you can back up what you say.

So what do you think? 

Week 2: The Value of Asking "Why?"

Last week, in our first class discussion, we addressed the question of whether, by studying and trying to understand a cultural behavior, a cultural anthropologist is actually justifying that behavior?  In other words, if we understand the role a behavior plays in a particular culture, if we can see what purpose it serves for the people that practice it, does that mean we are saying that this behavior is morally “okay”?

If you have ever taken a logic or philosophy class, this question might look familiar to you.  This question addresses the principle of what is called the “Is/Ought Fallacy”.  The Is/Ought Fallacy (also called the Naturalistic Fallacy) is the misconception that recognizing the existence of a behavior (this is the “Is” part) automatically translates into a statement as to the moral value of that behavior (the “Ought” part).  It is a common error in logic to argue that because a behavior “is” (i.e., it exists and can be described and explained), that means that it “ought” to exist.

How about an example to help paint this picture?

The act of killing another person is felt to be morally bad behavior.  I think we can all agree on that general statement, and it is actually considered to be what is called a “cultural universal”.  All cultures world-wide have behavioral rules addressing the killing of another human being along with specified repercussions for taking of a life.  End of story, right?  Killing is wrong.

Not so fast.  While the existence of rules regarding killing are universal, the rules themselves are highly culturally specific, meaning that rules on killing are unique and specific to each particular culture you explore.

 

Take our own culture:  Yes, killing is wrong, but are there any circumstances where it is considered defensible?  We have laws which excuse the killing of another person if it is self-defense and rules are more lenient when a person kills in defense of their family.  Killing that occurs as an accident is not acceptable, but is usually punished to a lesser degree than those killings committed with intent and premeditation.  We also engage in wars in which many people are killed.  So the issue is not so black-and-white as we would like to think.

Yanomami War Party

Now look at other cultures:  Soon you will be reading about the Yanomamo of Brazil who conduct raids and killings that are considered culturally acceptable if they are done in revenge for other killings.   An eye for an eye, so to speak, and there are social repercussions and costs for not taking part in these revenge killings.  The Abelam of Papua New Guinea have rules allowing similar killing raids against neighboring villages to obtain resources or women, but only if they are conducted outside of the planting and harvesting season.  In polar populations, it is sometimes thought to be acceptable (indeed, a kindness) for older individuals to be placed on the ice to die when they are no longer considered to be productive members of society.  In India, new brides who are judged to be unsatisfactory, either in behavior or in dowry, can find themselves the victim of bride-burnings, often resulting in their deaths.  In some Islamic societies, it is recognized that women can be killed in “honor killings” if their behavior threatens the honor of their family.  And in nearly all religions, there are culturally specific rules outlining when it is and is not acceptable to take the life of another individual.

Martin Daly & Margo Wilson

All of these practices have been the focus of anthropological study in an attempt to better understand the pattern of these killing behaviors and the reasons why those behaviors exist.  Does this mean that anthropologists are arguing these behaviors “ought” to exist?  No.  But they still do exist, don’t they?

Attempts to explain these behaviors are not limited to cultural anthropology.  Physical anthropologists, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, analyzed homicides committed in Canadian populations and found a pattern that suggests that those most likely to engage in homicidal behavior are those who would have benefited the most from this behavior in our evolutionary history in terms of producing more offspring than others that didn’t kill, namely young, reproductive males who would have gained mates and resources by killing.  This suggests another interesting idea:  The behaviors we see today may not have modern cultural benefits but they might be genetic and behavioral artifacts from our distant evolutionary history when these behaviors were beneficial.  Does this mean that Daly & Wilson are justifying murderous behaviors?  That they “ought” to exist?  No.  But they do offer an interesting explanation as to why they do exist in human cultures.

And there is the root of the issue:  Why study these behaviors to begin with?  Why do we need to understand why they exist and persist in our society and in cultures world-wise?  Why can’t we just say they are “bad” and leave it at that?

There are two answers to these questions.  The first is that this is what anthropologists do.  They seek to understand and explain behaviors, both pleasant and unpleasant.  But once you have that explanation, it isn’t written into an anthropological journal and that is the end of the story.  Those who seek to alter these behaviors, to improve the situations of victims of these behaviors world-wide, can use this information to potentially end the behavior itself because they now understand the actual source of these behaviors.  It isn’t enough to pass laws banning a behavior if the cause of the behavior persists.  That would be like taking pain medication for a tooth-ache.  You stop the pain, but the reason for the pain persists.  The information produced from anthropological studies on behaviors we consider morally repugnant can be used to get to the source of the problem, to pull the rotten tooth, so to speak.  By addressing the source of the behaviors, by changing the environment in which these behaviors naturally occur, you are more likely to be successful reducing the incidence of the behaviors themselves.

Now it’s your turn to be the cultural anthropologist.  Think of a behavior that you find morally repugnant, either within your own culture or in a different culture.  This behavior may make you angry or turn your stomach.  But now you are being asked to acknowledge your culturally-shaped attitudes toward that behavior and step away from it to see the behavior without a moral bias.  Add one or two comments to the thread below that follows the following guidelines:

• Describe the behavior and identify the culture in which it occurs.  Try to do so using neutral descriptions that don’t reveal your aversion to this behavior.  Perhaps try to describe the behavior as if you were part of the culture in which it occurs.  Then offer a possible explanation as to why this behavior persists in this society.  What benefit does it provide to the individual committing the behavior and/or to the culture itself?  Why does it exist?  You may need to do a little research on this answer, or you can try to work your way through to this explanation logically on your own.  (5 bonus points)
• Respond to an initial comment by another student.  Critique their explanation, offer a different explanation, or point out where they allowed their own cultural bias to color their description or their explanation. (5 bonus points)

 Are you able to step outside of your own culture and avoid bias in your explanations? Remember, you may consider the behavior "bad", but trying to understand the behavior doesn't make you "bad" as well, so don't be afraid to explore and analyze from an anthropological perspective.  The only thing you can do wrong here is to cast judgment blindly without actually learning anything from this experience.